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Lemming — printable fact sheet
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Animal Fact Sheet
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Lemming
Lemmus lemmus
Lemmings are small, stocky Arctic and subarctic rodents, and they are the subject of one of the most durable pieces of wildlife misinformation ever produced. They do not commit mass suicide. That belief was cemented by the 1958 Disney documentary White Wilderness, which won an A…
Did you know?
- The myth that lemmings commit mass suicide originated from a misrepresented documentary and is not based in scientific fact.
- The Disney film crew paid Inuit children for live lemmings, trucked them across Canada, and pushed them off a cliff into a river for the shot; a 1982 CBC investigation exposed the whole thing. In a crash year snowy owls simply do not breed, and instead irrupt far south, which is why owl sightings in the northern United States track Arctic rodent populations. Norwegian lemmings are startlingly aggressive for a small rodent, and will scream, lunge and bite at a human hand rather than flee.
What I learned
Draw the lemming
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